Clean Energy: If Apple Can't Afford to Think Different, No One Can

Those Apple stores are so beautiful. All pale and linear - clean clean clean. The irony is poignant. As we pointed out in our report, How Clean is your Cloud, Apple is in fact powering their iCloud with coal. Coal which is coming from Duke Energy, a utility that uses mountaintop removal coal - literally blowing up mountains and destroying the landscape to produce more dirty energy.

It's a no brainer - the people that use the super sleek iPad could do without thinking that each time they upload a photo of their daughter or their mother to the iCloud, they are using fossil fuels to do so. Because fossil fuels are antiquated and filthy - they don't go with this year's iPad.

In those pristine Apple stores around the world today, customers heard the dirty truth - In Regent Street, London, a team of 25 activists from Greenpeace UK arrived at the flagship store and set to work redressing the minimalist window, plastering it instead with an alternative advert for Introducing iCoal, an internet spoof which parodies Apple's latest advert for the iCloud. Others headed into the store and handed out perfectly formed Apples, shaped from coal, to let the customers know that Apple isn't as pure as the driven snow after all.

Hours earlier in San Francisco and New York, Greenpeace US activists had arrived at stores with hundreds of black balloons, which they released up to the clear glass ceilings. At the same time a second team arrived, dressed as a super cool cleaning crew, there to clean up the cloud. And then yet more teams, from Greenpeace in Hungary, Hong Kong and Holland (the alliteration was accidental). The staff weren't thrilled, of course, but by and large they were open to Greenpeace's concerns and acknowledged that Apple, of course, should be green. Particularly when we highlighted that Google, Facebook and Yahoo! are all doing better.

With $110.2 billion in the bank, as Apple announced yesterday, if they can't afford to think different, no one can.